Newsletter Unsub Bug

[vinyl-junkie]

I've had to unsub from the newsletters at work, as I am switching state government agencies effective Monday and will be getting a new email address at the new place. I went through the unsubscribe links on copies of each of the newsletters that I had saved, and thought that took care of it. However, yesterday I still got the Tribune!

I went to the Tribune newsletter online this morning to see if I could unsub from there, and down toward the bottom right corner of the web page, I see the following:

You are currently subscribed as $subst('Recip.EmailAddr') to the HTML edition of the Tribune.

$subst('Recip.EmailAddr') is exactly what gets put in the "To" field of the Outlook Express email that opens up. That isn't going to cut it.

By the time I read anyone's reply, it will be too late for me to try myself to unsub the old addy, but I just wanted someone to know about the problems I experienced with this.

[Matt Mickiewicz]

Thanks for pointing this out! I'll get right onto it...

You can unsubscribe using: http://www.sitepoint.com/newsletter/manage.php

[Matt Mickiewicz]

Hmm.. very strange. I checked the last issue at three different email addresses where I receive the newsletter, and all of them had the unsubscribe link correctly parsed.

Can anyone else here have a look at the last issue sent and let us know whether there was a problem with it?

[vinyl-junkie]

I had a situation one time with another forum where the only way they could solve a weird problem similar to this one was for me to give them my logon id and password so they could logon as me and track down the problem (which they were able to spot right away).

If no one else comes along with anything else that might help, I'd be willing to PM my forum password to you while you sorted this out (and of course change the password when you were done). Just let me know if you'd be comfortable doing that.

[Matt Mickiewicz]

Your Forum account is completely seperate from your newsletter subscriptions, so that wouldn't really help.

[vinyl-junkie]

Well, I certainly don't pretend to know the inner workings of your web page code, but I don't see how they can be entirely separate. When I go to your blog pages, I see a space down at the end of the page for me to comment. It knows who I am because it has "vinyl-junkie says" and a logout link above the comment box.

Yes, I know that is forum logon id, not my email address, but if the blog pages are smart enough to know my forum logon id, the web-based versions of the newsletters should similarly be smart enough to capture my email address when I use the Unsubscribe and Swap links on the page. Either that, or just replace the Unsubscribe and Swap links with the manage.php link, same as the rest, since the manage.php page covers it all.

[Rick]

Well, I certainly don't pretend to know the inner workings of your web page code, but I don't see how they can be entirely separate. When I go to your blog pages, I see a space down at the end of the page for me to comment. It knows who I am because it has "vinyl-junkie says" and a logout link above the comment box.

The article comments system and the blogs system are based around the forums - when you post a comment you are pretty much just making a post in the forums - the same cookie that keeps you logged into the forums lets the comments form know who you are. Newsletters are a seperate email list system.

If it helps: The last issue of the tribune I recieved (#319) had all the correct email info and un-sub etc links.

[vinyl-junkie]

If it helps: The last issue of the tribune I recieved (#319) had all the correct email info and un-sub etc links.

Are you talking about the email version of the newsletter? What I was talking about in my original post, and I guess I probably wasn't too clear about that, is that when I went to the web-based version of the newsletter (here) it has those screwy Unsubscribe and Swap links on the web page.

If you look at the source code for the web page, the Unsubscribe link is

"mailto:$subst('Email.UnSub')"

and the Swap link is

"http://sitepoint.com/newsletter/textplease.php?email=$subst('Recip.EmailAddr')"

Both of those links are using a literal $subst() value instead of my email address.

Hope that makes more sense than what I said originally.

[Rick]

Ah right.

Well as far as I know, the archives for the newsletters are totally seperate from the forums system, so they have no way of knowing who you are / what your email address might be.

[Matt Mickiewicz]

Ahhh... ok. I get it now... We haven't setup our online newsletter archives to recognize who you are or to swap in custom unsubscribe-links. The assumption is that most people will want to unsubscribe directly from the email they receive in their Inbox.